Author's note: once again, the author is forced to reveal a congenital inability to color within the lines. As I produced for the Open Call on "your worst job ever" a compendium of anecdotes under the opening line, "I have never had a bad job," to this call for a tale of my "most memorable New Year's Eve" I find it possible only to respond with a memoir of half a lifetime's worth of New Year's Eve celebrations. I beg the gentle reader's indulgence of this defect in my capacity for taking direction.

I have probably ingested more LSD on December 31st than on any other day over the years.

As I bear down on marking a half century of Life during this particular spin of the Great Wheel, discounting the first 14 or 15 years as having been largely inconsequential to any survey of whatever might constitute a "memorable" New Year's Eve, I can look back and count probably half of the succeeding 25  years in which the New Year's baby took the stage wearing a psychedelic sash.

Which ought not be read, necessarily, as an endorsement of LSD, by any means. It's only an admission that, for a large portion of my adult life, that particular party favor was an integral aspect of the way I celebrated what is, in many cultures, the most festive night of the year.

For many residents of a certain age living in the San Francisco Bay Area  during the 1980s and 1990s, New Year's as likely as not meant a four night stand with Bill Graham and the Grateful Dead at the Oakland Coliseum. Tripping with the Dead on New Year's was actually one of the only ways to make it through the Reagan and Bush years with anything close to a sense of equanimity - and there were a few truly memorable jams, such as one  in 1982 > 1983, with Etta James and the Tower of Power raising up the ghosts of both Otis Redding and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan on the classic, Hard to Handle:

It's really quite astonishing, as I sit here, having thought initially to not respond at all to this Open Call, how the memories of New Year's Eves past come flooding back. How, in the end, am I to choose one as more memorable than another?

Would it be that bitterly cold night in 1976 > 1977, when I joined throngs of behatted, noisemaking revelers in the streets around Overton Square in Memphis, TN, where I drank so much Peppermint Schnapps and kissed a hundred strangers, babbling, "kiss me, I'm a candy cane!"? I lost my shoes that night, but I made it home alive and swore to God I'd never drink Peppermint Schnapps again.

There was a nice run of year-end family vacations to destinations in the Caribbean between '78 and '82, where my father, hoping to compensate for the untimely death of our Mom in early 1978, rented luxurious villas in the hills of St. Croix, St. Martin and Jamaica, where the whole family would spend the week after Christmas pretending to audition for an episode of Robin Leach's Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

In 1979 > 1980 on St. Croix, after the family enjoyed a lovely meal of delicacies from the sea, including conch fritters I can taste as I type these words, my brother and I drove our rental car down to the waterfront in town. We found the most beautiful bartender I had ever seen, who drew from her bottomless well of kamikaze fixins and allowed us to blind ourselves so thoroughly by closing time I managed to drive the rental car through the front doors of the post office, only to back out and realize three blocks away we'd never make it all the way back to our villa in the hills on the rims of four flat tires. That particular episode made the morning editions of the local paper on Jan 2nd and there was some uncertainty regarding our freedom to leave the island before my father put up a fairly substantial cash bond to cover repairs to both the car and the post office. That was a memorable New Year's Eve.

1981 > 1982 saw us take down a rambling estate in the hills above Ocho Rios, Jamaica, where I and my girlfriend spent most of our waking ours in the servants' quarters. I had set up camp there, away from the rest of the family, where we smoked kind bud and had the unbridled sex that only 22 year-olds can have. On New Years' Eve, we found a reggae bar in a tin shack well off the tourist track, where I know my father feared for our safety, but the locals welcomed us for our brazen youth and our palpable lust for life, and I remember feeling, as we danced a close, slow dance sometime in the wee hours of the morning, nothing might ever feel as sweet and real as that moment in time.

After the first run of Dead New Year's celebrations between '82 - '85, I found myself in Asia for the next couple of New Year's, an interesting place to be, especially considering I was there on a shoestring budget, often found myself the only westerner around in the very-off-the-beaten-track locations I got myself to, and in view of the fact that Asian culture has its own calendar - based not on the Western solar year, but on lunar transits, in which December 31 - January 1 is largely unremarkable.

One year, I spent the evening drinking tea with the family of a Karen elder in a remote village in the hills of northern Thailand. The family patriarch, who spoke passing English in addition to Thai, Mandarin, Japanese and about 4 or 5 languages of the indigenous hill tribes, did his best to convince me to stay with him and his family, to tutor his children in English and learn the ancient ways of the village's cultivation of tea. I was too shortsighted and not yet gone long enough from the United States to realize the opportunity I would pass up by leaving his village a couple of days later.

Back in the States after my Asian sojourn, I spent the first half of the 90s either tripping again with Jerry Garcia and friends in Oakland on New Year's, or tending bar at my own increasingly popular good times emporium, Nickie's BBQ on Haight Street in San Francisco. Behind the bar at Nickie's during those years I began to grok the wisdom underlying the popular saying that New Year's is Amateur Night. It's one thing to be an unhinged celebrant, hellbent on drinking a month's worth of alcohol in a few hours, and quite another to be the person serving up the booze. I never felt bad about the exorbitant cover charge we were able to get on New Year's and I guess, now, looking back, the seeds of my current attitude toward the night were planted back then.

But I didn't have it out of my system entirely by 1995 > 1996, and the final years of the past millennium saw, believe it or not, some of the most memorable New Year's Eves of my life.

Like the year I organized a trip for a dozen close friends to Maastricht, where I'd found in the middle of nowhere an old farm that had been converted to a rustic, yet high-end Dutch B&B of sorts. It was close enough to Brussels, Cologne and Amsterdam to provide a memorable week of epicurean decadence but far enough from anywhere to offer the wide-open space 12 Americans on LSD needed to be tolerated as a passing curiosity. We rented two Volkswagen minivans and had there been some meta-cinematographer filming us, we'd have looked like nothing so much as an outtake from some bizarre Monty Python fantasy.

A core group of my long-time friends and I got it into our heads we were going to rent a castle in Spain to commemorate the millennium New Year and, to announce the project, for New Year's 1997 > 1998, I decided we would close Nickie's and have a private party.

People came from all over the country and we jammed nearly 200 tuxedo-clad, slinky-dressed revelers, fully half of whom were tripipng, into the world's funkiest danceclub for a night of revelry few would soon forget. I ended up bidding the last guests adieu around 6am New Year's Day, locked the front gates to the club, and enjoyed a crisp, bright and sunny early-morning stroll through the Haight and Ashbury Heights, still in my tuxedo, happily greeting the day's earliest risers out for a cup of joe or retrieving their morning papers, thinking to myself, "I had more fun than you did last night."

Two years later came a fitting culmination to a near lifetime of over-the-top New Year's celebrations, when 80 people from half a dozen countries joined me at Castillo de Santa Catalina in Jaen, southern Spain, for five days of revelry that matched any millennium celebration I've heard about - at the time, or since. I wrote about some of the festivities at length, which you're welcome to peruse here, but suffice it to say, with the birth of my son the following spring, my LSD-soaked, Robin Leach and Monty Python-inspired New Year's celebrations of epic grandeur were finally at an end.

In almost every one of the eight turnings of the calendar page since our fiesta in Jaen, I've greeted the New Year in my dreams. Nowadays, it's usually a small coterie of family and friends, who gather for a simple meal, an exchange of warm wishes for health and good fortune in the coming year, with perhaps a nod to the stroke of midnight in New York's Times Square, and my wife and child and I are snuggled, warm in our beds long before champagne corks pop or fireworks hiss and sizzle in west coast skies.

It's interesting to me how none of the past eight New Year's Eves evoke particular memories, other than a uniform one of warmth and good cheer, and the sense that ringing in the New Year far from the madding crowd feels very right to me now.